The East Hall of Foguang Temple is the oldest sound witness to the basic grammar of Chinese timber architecture — dougong — at monumental scale. The problem is to transfer the load of a heavy tiled roof onto slender wooden columns without splitting them, while holding wide eaves aloft.

The solution is the dougong: a stepped corbel cushion of interlocking wooden blocks (dou) and bracket-arms (gong) inserted between the column capital and the roof beams. This cushion does not gather load at a single point; it spreads the roof's weight across several arms onto the column, and at the same time cantilevers the eaves outward, unsupported. As at Hōryū-ji, the joints are nail-free and flexible; the dougong layers move against one another during an earthquake, absorbing energy. The system thus serves both a static (load transfer) and a dynamic (damping) role.

The real strength of dougong is its modularity: standardised blocks can repeat at different scales, and a building can be dismantled, moved, or enlarged. This modular timber grammar becomes the unchanging syntax of Chinese — and the Korean and Japanese architecture it influenced — for a thousand years; the Forbidden City in Beijing is a direct descendant of the system that matured at Foguang. As most Tang timber was lost to war and fire, the Foguang East Hall is not merely a fine building but one of the only surviving structural documents of its age.